“I’m not going to bullshit you, Duffy, I honestly don’t remember. Hold on a minute and I’ll get my notes.”

“Thank you, I appreciate that,” I said.

He opened a drawer and flicked through a green jotter. He slid it across to me, but I couldn’t decipher the handwriting. I did notice that under “McAlpine” there was less than half a page of text. All in pencil. With a few doodles on the side. When I conducted a murder investigation, sometimes I filled two or even three ring-bound reporters’ notebooks.

I passed the notebook to Matty, who had been sufficiently pedagogically indoctrinated by me to frown and shake his head. He skimmed the notebook back across the table. Dougherty took it and smiled a little smile of satisfaction as if he was saying – see, I’m not a fuck up, I even kept my notes.

“No tracks. But I can’t tell if we looked behind the wall or not,” he admitted.

I turned to Matty. “Do me a favour, go down to the evidence room and see if you can bag me one of the shotgun pellets. We’ll see what they can find out up at the lab in Belfast? If that’s okay with you, Inspector Dougherty?”

“I don’t see what this has to do with your investigation?”

“Do you object?”

“No. If you want to go around wasting everyone’s time, go ahead, be my guest.”

Matty got up and left the office.

Dougherty looked at me. “I take it you’re not happy with the wife’s story then, is that it?” he asked.

So he wasn’t a complete fool. At least he saw my angle.

I shook my head. “I don’t know about that. She seemed fairly credible to me. I just want to eliminate all the other possible contingencies.”

“She came from a good family. Islandmagee locals. Her father was a Justice of Peace and of course she married into the McAlpines.”

“What’s special about the McAlpines?”

“Harry, the elder brother, is a big wheel. His grandfather did

something for the Empire. They gave him a gong for it.”

The clock on the wall reached twelve and with that he breathed an audible sigh of relief and reached in his desk drawer for a bottle of Johnnie Walker.

“A wee one before lunch?” he asked.

“Don’t mind if I do,” I replied.

He produced two mugs and poured us each a healthy measure.

When he had drunk and topped up his own mug he grinned.

“You like the wife for it?” he asked. “How do you explain the IRA code word? And I still don’t see what this’s got to do with your suitcase?”

“I’m not saying it was her. But the grouping on that wound is so tight it looks point blank to me. And if a couple of terrorists were marching up to him so close as to do that kind of point blank damage surely the dog would have been on them and he would have had his sidearm out,” I said.

“Aye,” Dougherty said thoughtfully.

“And besides the IRA don’t use shotguns anymore. Not since the early ’70s. Not since our Boston friends and Colonel Gaddafi started sending boatloads of proper ordnance. They’ve got M16 rifles and Uzis and Glock pistols now,” I said.

“I suppose,” he said, refilling his mug.

“And then there’s the lack of witnesses. And no trace of a gun, no shells, no motorbike,” I continued.

“But what about the code word?” Dougherty asked.

“Jesus, those things leak like a sieve. Her own husband might have told her the IRA-responsibility code word for late last year.”

“Why would she do it? There was no insurance policy. We checked that. And the army pension is pathetic.”

“A domestic, maybe? I don’t know,” I said.

“And your fucking suitcase?”

“Probably unrelated, but you never know, do you?”

He nodded, poured himself a third generous measure of Scotch.

“I’ve heard of you, Duffy. You were the hot shot in Carrickfergus who got himself the Queen’s Police Medal. Are you looking to make a big fucking splash in Larne, too?”

He was getting punchy now.

It was time to leave.

“No. I’m not. This isn’t my case. I’m done and unless Mrs McAlpine is involved in my murder somehow you probably won’t be hearing from me again.”

“Aye, pal, don’t forget this is my manor, not yours.”

“I won’t forget.”

I got to my feet and offered him my hand and he reluctantly shook it.

I saw myself out.

I waited for Matty by the desk sergeant’s desk.

He came back from the evidence room empty-handed.

“What happened, they wouldn’t let you in?”

“They let me in all right but the locker’s empty boss. Nothing there at all.”

“They’ve moved it?”

“Lost it. A few weeks ago they moved the McAlpine evidence to the Cold Case Storage Room but when I went there the box was empty. The duty sergeant looked through the log and has no idea where the stuff went. He told me shite like this happens all the time.”

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph. All right, I better go myself.”

We went to the evidence room and searched high and low for half an hour but it was gone. Either lost in a spring cleaning or deliberately thrown out. Incompetence or cover up – both were equally likely. I liked the former better because asking who was covering up for whom raised all sorts of difficult questions.

It was drizzling when we got back outside.

Matty lit me one of his Benson and Hedges and we smoked under the overhang and watched the potholes fill up with water for a couple of minutes.

“I’m not saying that these lads are the worst cops in Ireland …” Matty began and then hesitated, unsure if I was going to countenance this level of perfidy.

“Yes?”

“If there’s a shittier station than this lot I hope to God I’m never posted there,” he concluded.

“Oh, there’s worse. I was at a station in Fermanagh where they dressed up as witches for Halloween. Big beefy sergeant called McCrae dolled up as Elizabeth Montgomery was the stuff of nightmares … Larne would be okay, you’d be the superstar of the department if you got the bloody days of the week right.”

We nailed another couple of smokes and got back in the Land Rover. Matty drove us out of the car park and the Constables at the gate gave us the thumbs up as they raised the barrier to let us out.

Matty drove through Larne past a massive UVF mural of two terrorists riding dragons and carrying AK 47s.

We turned up onto the A2 coast road.

“Where to now, Sean?”

“Carrickfergus Salvation Army,” I said. “It’s a long shot but maybe they’ll remember what happened to that suitcase, if she really did bring it in there.”

“Why would she lie about that?”

“Why does anybody lie about anything?”

Matty nodded and accelerated up onto the dual carriageway. The Land Rover was heavily armour plated and bullet-proofed, but the juiced engine still did zero to sixty in about eight seconds.

We put on Irish radio again. It was the same programme as before; this time the interviewee, a man called O’Cannagh, from the County Mayo, was talking about the mysterious behaviour of his cattle which baffled the local vets but which he felt was something to do with flying saucers. The man was explaining this fascinating hypothesis in Irish, a language Matty didn’t speak, so I had to turn it off. Neither of us could stand the constant jabber about the Falklands on news radio so we went for Ms Armatrading again.

Matty drummed his fingers impatiently on the steering wheel. “I know what you’re thinking, Sean, you’re thinking we should stick our noses in here, aren’t you?”

“Maybe.”

“Listen, Sean, what if she’s telling the truth about the suitcase but she was, for whatever reason, lying about her husband’s murder?”

“What about it?”

“Then it’s not our case, mate, is it?” he said.

“And if she killed the poor bastard?”

“If she killed the poor bastard, it becomes, in the coinage of Douglas Adams, an SEP.”

“Who’s Douglas Adams? And what’s an SEP?” I asked.

“If you were down with the kids, Sean, you’d know that Douglas Adams has written this very popular radio series called The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I listen to it when I’m fishing.”